He admired Socrates' lack of concern for his own burial arrangements and was particularly impressed by his con- stancy in the face of a delayed execution:
There is nothing, in my opinion, more illustrious in the life of Socrates than having had thirty whole days to ruminate his death sentence, having digested it all that time with a very certain expectation, without emotion, without alteration, and with a tenor of actions and words rather lowered and relaxed than strained and exalted by the weight of such a reflection.
Again, in the essay On Diversion, he remarks on Socrates' unusual ability to face death head-on: 'to become acquainted with death with an ordinary countenance, to become famil- iar with it and play with it'. Socrates and death were on the same kind of terms as Montaigne and his cat: they played together as equals.
In the essay On Cruelty, Montaigne argues initially that virtue depends on struggle and the greatest acts of virtue are always painful. Yet Socrates seems not to fit this model. Montaigne is troubled by the problem: 'The soul of Socrates, which is the most perfect that has come to my knowledge, would be, by my reckoning, a soul deserving little commend- ation: for I cannot conceive, in that person, any power of vicious lust.' Meditation on Socrates prompts him to change his mind and finally adopt a principle completely contrary to that with which he began: the greatest acts of virtue are pleas- urable, not painful. Socrates exceeds even Cato in the sweet- ness and pleasure he found in death. Montaigne exclaims, 'I beg Cato to forgive me: his death was more tragic and more exalted. But this death, though I cannot say how, is even more beautiful.' Although he 'cannot say how', the claim itself pro- vides an answer. Virtue, for Socrates even more than for Cato, is not laborious but easy: 'It has passed into [his] nature.' The death of Socrates is admirable precisely because it was not experienced as 'tragic' or 'exalted', but as ordinary, easy, even pleasurable. In the essay On Physiognomy, he rejects the story that Socrates' face reflected the innate ugliness of his souclass="underline" 'So excellent a soul was never self-made.'
Montaigne argues vehemently against the Platonic notion that virtue should involve a struggle against baser, physi- cal desires. Intellect, and over-intellectualising, are far more likely to lead to evil and suffering than is the simple, unim- aginative life of ordinary people. This leads him to suggest at times that Socrates' imperturbability in the hour of his death was not, after all, so unusual. He points to a series of examples of low-born people who approach even torturous deaths with laughter and jokes, toasting their friends and 'yielding in nothing to Socrates'. In On Cruelty he implies that Socrates' death was unusual among philosophers, but only because learning makes most scholars blind to their own fundamental ignorance. Socrates died well because he died like one of Montaigne's own peasant neighbours: he was, like them, conscious that he knew nothing about death.
Socrates was thus the founding father of the ideal school of philosophy: the School of Stupidity.
Montaigne's Socrates may seem superficially similar to that of Nicholas of Cusa. Both thinkers were interested in Socratic ignorance. But the treatise, On Learned Ignorance, is concerned with the metaphysical issue of our inability to comprehend God, while Montaigne's Essays are focused on ordinary human experience, in all its complexity. Montaigne's Socrates is surprising precisely because he is not special; he is just a regular man.
Montaigne was particularly interested in the notion that a whole life may be spent in preparation for death. He chal- lenges this philosophical commonplace, claiming that dying is the one great task for which we cannot practise. We undergo death only once, there can be no rehearsal - except through a physical near-death experience. Philosophical injunctions to remember death are absurd. 'If you don't know how to die, don't worry: Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately.' Cicero is wrong to say that 'the whole life of a philosopher is a meditation on death'. Montaigne says 'Death is indeed the end, but not therefore the goal, of life; it is its finish, its extremity, but not therefore its object.' Montaigne does not mention the fact that Cicero borrowed this claim from Socrates himself, in the Phaedo.
Montaigne chooses the ironic, questioning defendant of the Apology over the dying hero of the Phaedo. Socrates is, unlike Cicero or Seneca, a useful philosophic model for those contemplating death, because his attitude towards it is 'nonchalant and mild', 'a sober, sane, plea, but at the same time natural and lowly, inconceivably lofty, truthful, frank, and just beyond all example'.
The true greatness of Socrates' death is that it undermines the philosophical falsehood that death is a thing apart from the rest of life. In the case of Socrates, the death was no dif- ferent from the life. Socrates showed how death is always integrated and involved with life. People do not become dif- ferent, suddenly, on their deathbeds: 'Every death should correspond with its life. We do not become different for dying. I always interpret the death by the life. And if they tell me of a death strong in appearance, attached to a feeble life, I maintain that it is produced by a feeble cause corresponding with the life.' Socrates understood the ordinariness of death as well as its unknowability. He died, as he lived: as himself. Montaigne uses the death of Socrates as an example for ordi- nary, secular man.
THE APOTHEOSIS OF PHILOSOPHY: FROM ENLIGHTENMENT TO REVOLUTION
Benjamin West's first biographer, John Galt, tells a striking story about how the artist came to produce his first history painting, The Death of Socrates (1756), at the age of just eight- een. We are told that one client was amazed at the artist's talent and
he observed to him, that, if he could paint as well, he would not waste his time on portraits, but would devote himself to historical subjects; and he mentioned the Death of Socrates as affording one of the best topics for illustrating the moral effect of the art of painting. The Painter knew nothing of the history of the Philosopher; and, upon confessing his ignorance, Mr Henry went to his library, and, taking down a volume of the English translation of Plutarch, read to him the account given by that writer of this affecting story.
This anecdote is probably complete fiction. Galt presum- ably means 'Plato' when he says 'Plutarch' - a detail that hardly helps his credibility. In fact, West's striking image of
12. Benjamin West's Death of Socrates (1756) was his first history painting. The crowded canvas shows Socrates and his disciples confronting a whole army of heavily armed prison guards. West based his composition on an engraving from a popular textbook, Charles Rollin's Ancient History.
the barbarous guards confronting Socrates and his friends was inspired by an engraving from the frontispiece of Charles Rollin's Ancient History (London, 1738-40; engrav- ing by Jacques Philipe le Bas after Hubert Gravelot). The moving description of Socrates' death in Rollin's History played a major part in the popularisation of the legend.
But Galt's story marks a turning point in the reception history of the death of Socrates. In the earlier part of the eighteenth century, it was plausible that an intelligent young
painter could be only dimly aware of who Socrates was. By the middle decades of the century, the death of Socrates was everywhere. It became an enormously fashionable topic for artists, writers and intellectuals.
Classical deaths in general were popular in this period. Trends in painting and drama had changed, and artists who might, a century earlier, have painted a Deposition of Christ or a Pieta now searched classical literature for a suitable death. Academic scholarship, archaeology and historical method had produced new discoveries about the ancient world, but also marked a new distance from the lives of the ancients. Ancient deaths were particularly interesting in a period that saw itself as decisively modern: the death of Socrates, Seneca or Cato could hint at the death of antiquity as a whole.